Congressional Power - Implementing the constitutional structure

Why, then, did what appeared to be a constitutional structure evenly
divided between the two branches so quickly tip in favor of the executive?
The legacy of the colonial and revolutionary eras played a key role, as
did the increasing professionalization of U.S. foreign policy. So, too,
did the national security threat posed by the wars of the French
Revolution. Perhaps most important was the intimate link between
international issues and the first party system, which caused most
contentious foreign policy questions to be debated along partisan rather
than institutional lines. Not surprisingly, therefore, the presidency of
John Adams, characterized by a closely divided Congress and contentious
relations between the two branches, broke relatively little new ground in
terms of altering the legislative-executive relationship, at least in the
long term. The last Federalist president, for example, made sure to obtain
congressional approval for the technically undeclared Quasi-War with
France.

The War of 1812 transformed both the international and domestic
environment, and in the process it altered the nature of the
legislative-executive relationship. In the international arena, the Treaty
of Ghent, followed closely by the Rush-Bagot agreement demilitarizing the
Great Lakes and the Adams-Onís Treaty obtaining Spanish Florida,
ended any credible European threat to the country's survival.
Domestically, the unity between the executive branch and a majority of the
legislature did not survive the 1820s schism among the Jeffersonian
Republicans. In this new context, members of Congress began using foreign
policy issues to obtain political advantage over the executive. One
example came in 1817 and 1818, when Henry Clay attempted to force
diplomatic recognition of the Spanish-American republics through direct
congressional action. Clay believed that the United States, as a state
founded in revolution itself, should assist other colonies attempting to
win their freedom. But the speaker of the House also realized his
initiative would embarrass his chief rival for the presidency, Secretary
of State John Quincy Adams, and thus might work to his political benefit.
Adams proved the more skillful politician, however, a trait he
demonstrated again six years later when he discerned the electoral merit
in a unilateral U.S. declaration opposing European recolonization in the
hemisphere (the Monroe Doctrine). Partisan concerns also appeared
prominently in the first major foreign policy fight between the two
branches during Adams's presidency, the resolution to obtain
congressional backing of his effort to send U.S. delegates to the 1826
Panama Congress. A Senate filibuster delayed the appropriations necessary
to fund the delegates' mission.

These skirmishes set the stage for the period between 1844 and 1860, which
featured the most clear-cut intersection of partisan, institutional, and
ideological battles matching Congress against the president. By 1860, the
legislature's power on foreign policy reached, arguably, its
highest point in American history. Few would have predicted this outcome
when the expansionist James Polk captured the presidency in 1844. Without
congressional sanction, Polk ordered U.S. troops into territory disputed
between the United States and Mexico, triggering a battle between armed
forces of the two nations. When Congress finally did consider a
declaration of war, with fighting already under way, the administration
used procedural tactics to ram the measure through both houses.
Polk's conduct thus exposed him to the charge of usurping
legislative prerogatives, reopening dormant debates about executive
authority in foreign affairs. Meanwhile, the introduction of the 1846
Wilmot Proviso (which called for forbidding slavery in any newly acquired
territories) eradicated the line between international and domestic
matters by clearly linking slavery and expansion. At one pole of
congressional opinion, abolitionists in the House aggressively made the
case against expansionism. Led by John Quincy Adams (Whig-Massachusetts)
and Joshua Giddings (Whig-Ohio), they transferred their opposition to
slavery at home to an attack on imperialism abroad and used the war to
indict the slave power's dominance of the nation's political
structures. In the process, figures like Adams and Giddings showed how
voices shut out of executive branch deliberations could make themselves
heard through congressional action.

Partisan gridlock accompanied this ideological polarization, blocking any
hope for Polk to retain the backing that he enjoyed in 1846, when only
fourteen members of the House and no senators voted against the war
declaration. The changing context of foreign policy issues splintered his
electoral coalition, diluting support for the president's bid to
annex all of Mexico. With Polk complaining privately about Congress having
paralyzed his diplomacy, his term ended with Latin American policy
immobilized by the sectionalization of manifest destiny, institutional
conflict between the legislative and executive branches, intense partisan
attacks, and sharp disagreement between proslavery expansionists and
abolitionist anti-imperialists.

In the end, a penchant for secrecy, bypassing Congress, and allowing his
domestic base to atrophy undermined Polk's freedom of action. His
successors, the Whig presidents Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore,
discovered that a foreign policy focused on limiting U.S. expansionism
through treaties with other imperial powers lacked appeal in a Congress
increasingly polarized over expansionism. The first attempt of the Whigs
in this regard was the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty of 1850, in which the United
States and England agreed that neither would unilaterally construct a
trans-isthmian canal; the party's second was the Tripartite Treaty
of 1852, in which the United States, England, and France agreed to respect
the status quo in Cuba. Furious Senate objections, from not only
southerners but northern senators such as Henry Wilson, forced Secretary
of State John Clayton to interpret his 1850 handiwork restrictively;
similar Senate opposition prompted President Fillmore to shelve the
Tripartite Treaty altogether.

In this environment, implementing a bold international agenda could not
occur without stable congressional support. In meeting this requirement,
the final chief executive of the period, James Buchanan, displayed a good
deal of originality. Buchanan believed that, given the domestic tumult of
the preceding decade, foreign powers would take him seriously only if he
could prove that, in contrast to Polk, Taylor, Fillmore, and Pierce,
Congress would not block his actions. The new president therefore
attempted a variety of approaches to augment his position—at the
legislature's expense. In 1858 he requested from Congress a
resolution granting him discretionary authority to wage war against
Paraguay, a procedure he later proposed expanding to all Latin American
diplomatic issues. A year later, he sought to advance his most important
goal—annexing Cuba—by urging Congress to appropriate $30
million to initiate the process. He (and his Senate critics) expected that
once having spent the money, the upper chamber would not reject any future
treaty bringing Cuba into the Union.

But in these and other initiatives Buchanan found himself consistently
rebuffed by Senate Republicans. An ideological diverse coalition led by
Republican Jacob Collamer of Vermont inflicted on the president an
embarrassing defeat during initial consideration of the Paraguayan
resolution. Collamer again played a leading role in attacks against the
$30 million bill, and now Republicans with a higher national profile, such
as New York's William Seward and New Hampshire's John Hale,
joined them. This fierce opposition to the $30 million bill, for instance,
attracted notice as far away as Madrid. William Preston, the minister sent
by the administration to begin negotiations for the purchase of Cuba, was
left to lament: "The character of the debate in Congress…
has gone very far to revive the hopes of the Spaniards that they will be
able to retain the island, and that our discord, and the distraction of
party, will render the United States powerless in any struggle."
The four decades following the Treaty of Ghent thus witnessed a
legislature much more willing to launch (and much more effective in
sustaining) ideological and legislative challenges to executive supremacy.

After 1860, however, the changing international and domestic environment
caused congressional Republicans to reconsider their earlier conviction
that Congress should reign supreme in U.S. foreign policy. During the
Civil War, severe divisions over both military and Latin American issues
split apart the GOP caucus. As Wisconsin Republican James Doolittle joked
of his New Hampshire colleague John Hale, the upper chamber's most
outspoken anti-imperialist, a "long habit of continued denunciation
against the Administration or the party in power for fifteen or twenty
years in succession has had some effect on the habits of his mind."
In addition, with their party dominating the presidency throughout the
period, Republicans grew less enamored (except during Andrew
Johnson's presidency) with philosophical defenses of an active
congressional role in foreign policy. That several leading members of the
party struggled to use the congressional committee system to oversee the
conduct of the Civil War undoubtedly reinforced this disinclination.

Despite these developments, Congress retained more than enough power to
block aggressive international initiatives. The willingness of Gilded Age
chief executives to uphold tradition and negotiate substantial agreements
with foreign powers as treaties reinforced Congress's influence.
The failure of the three most ambitious of these treaties—U.S.
Grant's scheme to annex the Dominican Republic in 1870, the 1884
effort to establish a U.S. protectorate over Nicaragua, and Benjamin
Harrison's gambit to annex Hawaii in 1892—prompted future
secretary of state John Hay to compare a treaty entering the Senate with a
bull going into the arena, in that neither would depart alive.
Hay's comment testified to the strength of the ideologically
awkward but politically potent coalition of the remaining Republican
anti-imperialists, such as Carl Schurz and Charles Sumner, and most of the
body's Democrats. Once again, ideological extremes exerted a
disproportionate influence in Congress. Senate Democrats cared little
about anti-imperialism, but they believed that increased executive
authority in international affairs would establish a precedent that
presidents could later use to unilaterally advance the cause of civil
rights. Congress even proved capable from time to time of acting in a more
positive fashion, as in 1888, when majorities in both houses passed a
resolution demanding that Grover Cleveland's administration
initiate a conference of Western Hemisphere nations to address trade and
other economic issues.